Hyderabad techie death: A murder without clues, the victim where she s

Hyderabad techie death: A murder without clues, the victim where she shouldnâ€™t have been

The spot lies off the Eastern Express Highway between Mumbai and Thane, a road too busy for anyone to throw a second glance at the expanse of land alongside the service road. For the same reason, however, it should have been difficult for anyone to carry and dump a murder victim there.

It was from here in Bhandup, on Mumbaiâ€™s outskirts, that the police recovered the body of Esther Anuhya, 23, a techie hailing from Hyderabad and working in Mumbai. Nearly a week later, no clear picture has emerged about what had happened after her disappearance on January 5; the body was found on January 16.

Today, the lane leading to Thane bustles with traffic as usual. Even when a motorist stops occasionally, it is for a smoke or to talk on his cellphone, not to look at the expanse of land filled with rubble, sand and garbage, and now marked by a yellow police tape and the presence of two policemen. A slight incline formed by the rubble hides the spot where the body was found.

Esther, 23, working with an IT firm in Malad, Mumbai, left her Hyderabad home on January 4 after having spent Christmas and New Year with her family. She reached Mumbaiâ€™s Lokmanya Tilak Terminus around 5.30 am on January 5, and was supposed to go to her hostel in Andheri.

She never got there.

After trying to reach her for a day, her father approached Vijayawada railway police, who forwarded his missing persons complaint to the Kurla railway police, who in turn sent out a message to all police stations in Mumbai.

It was the stench of the body that led to its eventual discovery in Bhandup, which is nowhere on Estherâ€™s way to Andheri. A motorist called the police control room about the smell. When the police got there, they found it overpowering. â€œI still canâ€™t get the smell out of my head,â€ said constable Dilip Mane of Kanjurmarg police station.

The level of decomposition made it impossible to detect how exactly she had been killed. There were injuries around the private parts, suggesting sexual assault, but the body had been burnt from the pelvis down. The spot still has evidence of the burning, the ground having turned black.

Estherâ€™s family, meanwhile, is trying to come to terms with its loss. â€œThe police may catch the person responsible tomorrow morning, or they may catch him 15 days later. The fact that Esther is gone will not change,â€ said her uncle Arun Kumar. â€œIf the missing persons complaint had been taken seriously, maybe we would never have had to see this day.â€

In the days following the discovery, the police scanned call data records of weeks and spoke to Estherâ€™s family, colleagues and friends at her hostel. All of them described her as a dedicated employee, focused only on her work, with no interest in a romantic relationship with anyone. That effectively rules out a lover.

The police also explored the possibility of jilted admirer but failed to establish there was any. They wondered if a smooth-talking criminal had lured Esther somewhere and then robbed and killed her, but this too seemed unlikely as everyone who knew her insisted she was too smart to be taken in by a stranger.

The one theory not entirely ruled out is that Esther took an autorickshaw or a taxi from the station to her hostel in Andheri, and that the driver took her instead to Bhandup, where he robbed and killed her, possibly after raping her. Esther was not very familiar with the cityâ€™s roads, and may not have noticed a wrong turn along the way, police say.

The selection of the spot suggests a thorough knowledge of the area, once again pointing to the possibility of an autorickshaw or taxi driver being behind the murder. One original question, however, remains.

â€œWhat we cannot understand yet is how someone managed to drag a body to the spot and burn it around 6.30 in the morning without being seen,â€ said a crime branch officer. â€œThe process would have taken at least 10 minutes and traffic is not so thin then. It is surprising that not one eyewitness has come forward.â€

Over the last four days, over 50 autorickshaw and taxi drivers have been questioned by the Kanjurmarg police and the crime branch, which has put its unit-8 as well as property cell on the job. There are no leads yet. On Tuesday, the police found a bag with three pairs of trousers and a shirt some distance from the spot, but said it does not seem to be connected to the crime.

The decomposition, partial burning and possible gnawing by rodents has made it tougher for the police and doctors to ascertain what brutality Esther may have gone through.

â€œWe are still not sure what chemical was used to burn the body,â€ said Sunil Shejwal, assistant commissioner of police, Bhandup division. â€œSeveral factors will be clear once we receive the postmortem and histo-pathology reports from J J Hospital.

The night after Delhi's law minister was staging a televised midnight raid in Delhi, a family gathered in Mumbai from Machilipatnam, Vijayawada, and as far as Doha, Qatar. They first huddled together in a police station, and then in the dank mortuary of a public hospital.

The tale of 23-year-old Esther Anuhya, employed with Tata Consultancy Services in Mumbai, had reached the dark turn they had been dreading for days. Esther, who had gone missing on 5 January after alighting at the suburban Lokmanya Tilak Terminus and had just been found that evening, dead, partially burnt, her body decomposed beyond recognition, blunt injuries on her body.

But even that grief was outpaced by the outrage they felt â€” they had told the Mumbai Police on 6 January that they had traced her cellphone's last signal to Bhandup, but not only had the police been unwilling and their response cold, but the body was also eventually found by despairing family members who formed search parties and combed the thicket themselves.

Over the next few days, amid the din of the vigilante ministers and the Sunanda Tharoor-Kejriwal dharna headlines, the sorry tale of the Mumbai Police's inaction, negligence and tragedy, one that would have had urban India choking, was covered quietly, minus the de rigueur television outrage.

For those who joined us late, the story till now:

A young engineer with TCS, Esther is on her way back to Mumbai after a Christmas holiday in her hometown of Machilipatnam. She boards a train from Vijayawada, meets a friend who boards in Secunderabad briefly to hand over a packed lunch, calls her father from Solapur to say the journey was uneventful and that she would call him the following morning from Mumbai and then vanishes. There is a short struggle to register a missing person's complaint, the usual runaround over jurisdiction, but a complaint is finally lodged. The family taps connections in cellphone service providing companies to locate her cellphone signals â€” both her phones were last in Bhandup.

Immediate family members rush to Mumbai and, along with some pressure from senior policemen from Andhra Pradesh (the girl's grand-uncle is a retired commandant of special police), approach senior police officers including at least one IPS officer. The police seem certain Esther has eloped and will show up eventually. Despairing, the family, now joined by relatives from the city and from as far as Doha, form search parties and start scouring the area around that glaring clue, the Bhandup cellphone towers. It takes them less than 12 hours to find the body, burnt and badly decomposed, identified from a finger-ring, the crime scene bearing signs of sexual assault.

Feeling let down by the Mumbai Police, the family grieved, jousted briefly with the idea of protesting the criminal negligence by authorities in not combing the area around the cellphone towers, but stifled their anger and sought justice before travelling back to Mahcilipatnam for the last rites.

The story might have ended there, for the headlines at least, had it not been for statements from policemen including Mumbai Police Commissioner Dr Satyapal Singh who said, almost as an afterthought, that it was in fact the Mumbai Police who found the body. Dr Singh even told CNN-IBN that there appear to be vested interests behind the allegation that the police investigation was tardy.

Nothing could be farther from the truth, say family members, who earlier described the reception they received from the Mumbai police, including an IPS officer who didn't make eye contact for the first 15 minutes of a conversation when the desperate family approached him, and a police station where officials asked why they had approached them when they did not have jurisdiction over the case.

Firstpost spoke to several members of the search parties formed that day. All confirmed independently that they found the body without the assistance of police officers or a patrol vehicle. In fact, policemen they approached had thrown their hands up, pleading inability to assist. Here are the accounts of those who were actually part of the search party.

1. Suzeeth Emmanuel, Esther's cousin:

I arrived in Mumbai on 12th and we, (me, a cousin and volunteers of an NGO) walked around the Bhandup slums and up the hillock there asking people if they had seen Anuhya. We were carrying her photograph. We got nothing from there. On the morning of 16 January, we went to the Kanjurmarg police station, they didn't know that such a case was being investigated by Unit Five of the Crime Branch or that the last signal her cellphone picked up was at Bhandup. We gave them the entire case details once again but were eventually told it was not their jurisdiction. If we wanted help with searching, we would have to approach Bhandup police station.

We went next to Bhandup police station. The inspector was away and we spoke to a constable on duty, gave in writing the entire case details. Eventually, as no help was forthcoming, we split into two groups and started combing the area in two cars, one was a hired taxi and the other was a relative's car. A friend of the taxi driver joined us on his motorbike. Two volunteers of an NGO came along too. I was leading one group and Deepak, another cousin, was leading the other team.

We started searching around 11.30 am or 12 noon, I don't remember the exact time. We searched for a couple of hours but didn't find anything. Then we broke for lunch and resumed after eating. That's when we found the body off the service road on one side of Eastern Express Highway. It appeared to be of a female, from the hair and as there were undergarments lying nearby. We could not identify the face, it was badly decomposed. There were dogs around the body. I then called out to Deepak who was across the highway and then went looking for a police patrol -- whoever it was, the body couldn't be left there. We found a police patrol nearby and then registered a complaint. The police patrol was not accompanying us. The police were initially hesitant to move the body, but we insisted. Had we left the body there another night, dogs would have destroyed it.

2. S Rufus Deepak Prasad, Esther's cousin:

I was on the other side of the road when the body was found. One gentleman helping us to search was on a motorbike and didn't take a u-turn that we took, he went ahead. He spotted something and asked us to come. Suzeeth was there next. He called me from across the road. After that we approached a local police patrol.

3. A member of a Mumbai-based NGO whose volunteers were searching with the family members:

I sent two of our volunteers to go along when I realised that Suzeeth and Deepak had decided to search themselves. The search first concentrated on the Bhandup West area, since the telephone tower locations mentioned a Bhandup Talao, and there is a pond in Bhandup West. The common area of the signal from two cellphones was mapped carefully by the victim's cousins, but then we realised the pond could be one on the east. That's when it was decided to search along Eastern Express Highway.

My volunteers were with the search party until around 3 pm, but the body was found only later. There was no police patrol with the search party.

4. The FIR registered at Kanjurmarg police station by Esther's father after the discovery of the body (it was identified by the finger ring) is also amply clear.

The FIR, as translated from Marathi, says the family searched Bhandup East area on Mumbai-Thane line along the service road and found a body near the trees. The hands and legs of the body were partly burnt but a yellow metal ring was found on the middle finger of the right hand. Having identified the body as that of his daughter Anuhaya, he had reached the Kanjur Marg police station to complain, it states.

Esther's life in Mumbai will now be part of the police's investigations â€” the family has no information from the police, just the news updates. They know now that four men were detained, but are not sure if there were any arrests or if there is any evidence. Her laptop remains untraced too.

Esther, in sharp contrast to the wretched questions around her death, appears to have been a sunny 23-year-old, tweeting birthday wishes to Roger Federer, straightening her hair, asking Ian Somerhalder on Twitter if there would be a fifth season of Vampire Diaries. After a particularly bleak week of Mumbai's rains last August, Esther tweeted: "In 3 mounths, this week is of ful sunlight outside with sun held high on the blue sky... Good afternun mumbai...."

For her still-wounded family, that her life was cut short by a cruel stroke of fate is tragic enough without the added injury of being called liars by senior policemen. In response to the Commissioner's statement that the body was found by the police and not by the family, they released a simple statement. The FIR is self-explanatory, they said. "We have lost a dear daughter at the age of 23. What vested interest do we have?" they asked.

Esther's father Jonathan Prasad, deeply disappointed with the Mumbai Police and with no apparent progress in the case even 20-odd days after she first went missing, approached Union Home Minister Sushilkumar Shinde, who wrote to Maharashtra Home Minister RR Patil directing a speedy investigation. He also met Yogendra Yadav. "Mr Shinde took it quite casually," Prasad says, speaking to Firstpost over the phone from Machilipatnam. "He issued a formal letter to RR Patil."

Over the days that he was in Mumbai, Prasad says, he sensed increasingly after the first three or four days that the Mumbai Police were doing nothing useful. "They kept checking the CDRs (call data records) of my daughter, pointing out that she had spoken for 20 minutes to this person or that. We had to get a ticket for one of her friends to visit Mumbai and back so that the police could speak to him â€” they just kept thinking that it was a boyfriend who she was with. If she had been with a boyfriend I would have been happy â€” her safety was primary. I sensed that she was in danger. And the police wasted the first week in checking her phone records, just saying again and again that they were checking,"

He approached the Aam Aadmi Party hoping somebody will raise their voice against the police inaction. "My demand is that if they have the culprits then they should recover her belongings and her laptop, then we can be sure they have the right men," Prasad says.

But it has been 21 days now since his daughter went missing. "I am losing hope."

More than two weeks after software engineer Esther Anuhya's body was found decomposed and burnt in a swamp near a major highway on the outskirts of Mumbai, the Railway Police have recovered the CCTV footage where the young woman could be seen at the Kurla Railway Terminus the day she disappeared.

The footage shows a man seen standing next to Ms Anuhya, and police suspect he may be behind her murder.

A team of railway police has left for Andhra Pradesh to show the clipping to the young woman's parents in an effort to identify him.

"This is a very good lead in the case. We are hoping to crack the case soon," said Shivaji Dhumal, Senior Inspector at Kurla Government Railway Police.

Police have so far failed to recover key evidence like the Ms Anuhya's bag and laptop.

The girl's father S Jonathan Prasad has accused the Mumbai Police of inaction and said he felt "helpless and disappointed" in his pursuit for justice.

Police had found Ms Anuhya's burnt body eleven days after she went missing from the Kurla Railway Terminus. The body was identified by her father, a retired Professor in the Andhra Pradesh University.

MUMBAI: Petty thief Chandrabhan Sanap posed as a private taxi driver and offered to drop techie Esther Anuhya home for Rs 300 before dawn on January 5 at the Lokmanya Tilak Terminus in Kurla. Once she had walked into the trap, he sexually assaulted and killed her in the mangroves near Kanjurmarg, said the police.

Sanap, the 28-year-old arrested in Nashik, has claimed that he tried to rape Esther, but his accomplice, Nandkumar Sahu, said Sanap had admitted to him that he had raped and murdered the girl.

Sahu was detained in Jharkhand and brought to the city to investigate his role in the brutal crime.

The police have booked Sanap under IPC sections 302 and 201 for murder and destroying evidence and are awaiting forensic reports to prove rape.

On January 5, Sanap, who had been drinking, came to LTT with theft on his mind. He targeted Anuhya posing as a driver. Giving his cellphone number and vehicle number, he sweet-talked her into being dropped on his bike. At the Kanjurmarg mangroves, barely two km from where he lives, he stopped, saying his bike had run out of fuel and attacked her.

Police commissioner Rakesh Maria said both detection techniques and technical evidence played a role when they tracked down Sanap alias Chaukya and Sahu as both were missing from a Kanjurmarg slum since Esther's body was found. An SIT and the crime branch were probing the case after the GRP drew a blank.

Giving details, Maria said Sanap, son of a railway porter, had been drinking on January 5 and arrived at LTT at around 4am with a clear intention to carry out a robbery/theft. He was a habitual offender and had several bag-snatching cases against his name. As the train bringing Anuhya back from a Christmas vacation at Machlipatnam arrived, he began hunting for a target. Soon, he spotted the techie coming out of the waiting room, and made his taxi pitch.

"To convince her, he gave her his cellphone number and brought her to the parking lot. At the parking lot, he told her he did not have his taxi, but could drop her on his motorcycle," said Maria. Asked how she agreed to go on a bike with an unknown person before the sun had risen, Maria said they were still interrogating Sanap and details would emerge.

Interestingly, sources said Sanap had parked his bike in front of the RPF office at the terminus. This may have inspired some confidence in Anuhya, who went with her backpack and a small trolley suitcase.

On reaching the deserted spot near a service road by the EEH, Sanap stopped the bike, saying he was out of fuel. He forced Anuhya into the shrubs and tried to rape her. As she resisted, he banged her head on the ground and the stones there and then strangled her with her stole.

"The accused collected her laptop and baggage and fled to the Sai Society slums in Kanjurmarg. There he realized he had forgotten to take her cell phone. He spoke to close friend and neighbour Sahu and returned with him to the site. Soon, he quit his cellphone search as day was breaking," said Sadanand Date, joint commissioner of police (crime). They took petrol from the bike and tried in vain to burn the body. It is surprising that during both trips, they did not take her gold ring.

"Nothing can compensate my losses, but I am happy the culprits have been booked. Now I wish that they are punished by law," said Anuhya's father S J S Prasad. He could not be in the city and was represented by his brother Arun Kumar at Maria's press meet.

"We studied footage from 33 CCTVs, more than one lakh call detail reports at LTT and the scene of crime, questioned around 2,500 suspects, including taxi, auto drivers and several look-alike suspects before we got hold of Chandrabhan," Maria said.

After Anuhya's family members found her partly-burned body and a proper police probe started, Sahu fled to Jharkhand and Sanap to Nashik. "In a bid to evade any suspicion, he grew a beard, started putting a tika on his forehead and avoided crowded places," said Nandkumar Gopale, an SIT member.

But he was only partially successful. Two weeks before the crime branch got him, the GRP tracked him down with the help of the CCTV footage from the station as first reported in the TOI on February 25. Two GRP constable, A Salvi and S Konde, traced him to the slums and got Sanap's mother to identify him. When they grilled him, Sanap gave a false phone number and managed to fob off the disinterested GRP.

But the crime branch proved more insistent. When he lied that he was not in Mumbai at the time of the crime, it scanned call records and found his location on the night of the crime to be near LTT.

Times View: Cops have not exactly covered themselves with glory in this case. Right from the start â€” when cops failed to take the missing complaint seriously â€” to the botched-up probe, everything that could have gone wrong has gone wrong. Cops need to handle complaints with a far greater degree of seriousness and compassion. And the LTT premises, one of the busiest gateways to the city, need to be made safer; this station is the worst advertisement Mumbai can have.